


Run

by VeloxVoid



Series: VeloxVoid's Original Works [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Animal Transformation, Body Horror, Chases, Forests, Gen, Horror, Natural Horror, Nature, Psychological Horror, Survival Horror, abandoned house, forest spirit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:47:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26146660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VeloxVoid/pseuds/VeloxVoid
Summary: Trapped inside a long-abandoned home, the forest's spirit resides. Yet when there are intruders, it will do everything within its ethereal power to protect its territory. Seeing its beastly form, any trespassers are certain never to return.
Series: VeloxVoid's Original Works [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1898653
Comments: 8
Kudos: 8





	Run

**Author's Note:**

> This was my piece for the incredible "I See You" zine centred around the themes of horror and nature. This zine is filled with some of the most incredible works I've ever seen, and I can't recommend it enough! If you'd like to read it *for free*, click here! https://twitter.com/fishsodumb/status/1299061169441906688?s=21

_More._

Its home had been perturbed.

This was not the first time, and would certainly not be the last.

The spirit prowled, taking silent footsteps across the dank, rotting floorboards of what it now called home, reaching the shattered window. Innumerable trees surrounded this hollow shell of a building, and sunlight broke through the canopy outside to warm the spirit in its rays, yet no shadow was cast. Unless it was fed, it could have no physical form.

Even so, its eyes could see. It gazed out at the forest beyond – at the wildlife that grew all around this structure of rotting wood. The spirit had guarded this forest for centuries, a spectral manifestation of the forest itself, and had watched it change over time. Once, the trees and bushes around had been mere shoots across a flat blanket of grass, with nothing except the sky above them. Now, no such sky was visible: the trees had grown, and the expanse of thick gnarled branches and dense leaves blocked it out – only the sun’s golden rays could slip through the gaps now, casting a peaceful haze through the treetops.

Yet, that peace was being disturbed. The galling cries of humans drifted up out of the forest, mingling with the chattering of the birds and insects all around. They sounded excited, _daring_ _._ It sickened the spirit – made it almost physically manifest with the black, swirling hatred curdling inside of it. The first humans had been bad enough: the destructive wretches who had built this house here, in the centre of the guardian’s forest. It had been so rife with hatred and rage and disgust that the humans had eventually sensed it, feared it, and fed it. The aura of their fright would make the spirit salivate and grow, until eventually it could be witnessed by their human eyes.

They had fled at once.

Now, more had arrived. Humans did this every so often, deeming it a challenge to explore this now-abandoned house, rooting through its cupboards and defacing its walls, leaving their waste upon its floors to sit for eternity.

The spirit did not like them one bit. Rage made it swell – made it emit a soft, hissing growl scarcely audible to human ears, and it moved. Its presence slid through the house, down the stairs that had partially crumbled, and moved to the window next to the house’s entrance.

It had once been boarded over, but intruders had plunged their way through the water-logged wood long ago, the action as easy as knives sliding through butter. Most of the house had decayed in such a way; lichen festered upon each wall in the spaces where the black mould didn’t grow, their spores mingling with the dust to make the air come alive with ghostly particles shimmering in the pale sunbeams.

The front entrance remained, a door with paint peeling upon the outside to look as though a thousand pointed fingernails had scraped across it to reveal the faded oak beneath. Even so, it was structurally unsound; the frame was sunken and rotting, and previous attempts to pry the door open made the beams above creak and shed splintering chunks that roused panic from whoever tried to enter.

Now, the intruders chose the window. One by one they crawled through the sodden wooden boards like maggots squirming through an open wound; the spirit stood invisibly over them all, breathing down their necks through its gaping maw. In this state, it could not harm, nor even manifest: it was scarcely perceptible, capable only of perturbing.

And that it intended to do.

Giggles of unease left the throats of the trespassers, accompanying words that pleased the spirit’s phantom ears: “creepy”, “weird”, “not right”. The leader of their pathetic little pack dismissed them, and trudged through the leaves and litter upon the floor with soft crunching sounds to explore. There were five of them – the same amount as those who had resided within as a family all those years ago – and they brought the putrid stench of humanity back within the walls to assault the senses of the forest’s guardian.

One of the intruders drew a gasp as the group headed towards the stairs. “What was that?” they asked, voice muffled through the mask they wore across their face. That was wise, the spirit had to admit with the faintest of sighs; asbestos thrived in the building, ever present since its deterioration.

But a swirling black cloud emanated from around the human as they spoke, one that filled the room with a sweet fragrance. It was the scent of food – of prey. The sweet, festering scent of panic mixed with the metallic tang of blood; the dankness of sweat and exhaustion that hit the nostrils like a slap in the face, narrowing the pupils and making saliva flood the mouth as the quarry was finally captured. Those sensations hit the spirit now, making it grin, almost crazed. _Yes,_ it would feast today.

It grew, swelled more, and the growl that rumbled unconsciously in its throat became louder. It wanted more. It _needed_ more. It followed.

Now, the spirit could cast the slightest, most feeble of shadows across the floor as light passed through its ethereal form. The shadows of the humans before it were bold against the damp wooden floorboards, but the spirit's was a mere grey flicker, as formless as it itself was. The stairs creaked beneath the intruders, though – splinters of wood fell away and clattered quietly to the floor beneath, and their steps disturbed years of dust to send it billowing up in the air.

Their fear grew; they emitted more nervous giggles, muttered reassurances to themselves, but it did nothing to quell the plumes of terror that rolled from their bodies like the hot breath of a predator against a winter morning's air.

They reached the top of the stairs and were met by dark and narrow corridors. Spiders had made countless webs in each corner, most of them old and wispy and tangled, capturing nothing except tufts of dust. Some of them still housed their creators though, with fat, thick bodies and legs thin and spindly. The sight of them made two of the intruders shriek and press hands to their mouths, and the spirit lapped it up.

"Don't be babies," the leader of their party scoffed, although the waver to their voice announced their unease plainly for anybody to see.

The disuse of the upstairs perturbed them further still. Cabinets had crumpled over the decades, spilling their contents of ancient picture frames and glassware to the ground where they sat in piles of lethal shards. They crunched beneath the shoes of the intruders, but still they ventured further into the house.

The forest’s guardian skulked behind them all the way, much larger than before. As they made their way into the master bedroom, it towered over the human at the back of the pack, staring into their skull. They looked at the bed, sheets moth-bitten and stained black with old mould and damp. Bookshelves had been torn out, books left in piles to rot. As the rest of the trespassers began to walk around, staring into more picture frames with wobbly smiles of unease, one covering their masked nose from the stench of old water, the human the spirit stood over became paralysed.

They whispered out into the room, voice choked with fear. “What’s behind me…?”

And the rest looked over.

Their faces came alive with fear: wide eyes, open mouths, skin draining of colour; their horror filled the room in a black fog, and the spirit consumed it all.

At last, it was sated. Its stomach was full and it salivated as it grew, taking shape; this forest housed hundreds of beautiful creatures, but two images filled the spirit’s minds as it became corporeal.

Not far from this house, the spirit had once seen a bear collapse, dead. Its mouth had been open, gaping and frothing with a pink-white foam. It had decomposed, maggots and flies crawling through the wounds they’d nibbled through its fur, swarming around its eyes still glossy with moisture.

The sight had been horrific for even the spirit to see. It would be perfect. Its body hulked over, and it grew the hunched back and four sturdy limbs of a brown bear; its matted coat missed patches of fur, revealing bone and nerves beneath broken, glistening, bloody skin and muscle.

It was not enough, though – it was not frightening enough. It conjured up another image: another decaying sight it had seen outside of this house. A deer had fallen, one of its antlers shed and bloody, the other still attached but snapped and broken. The thin skin of its face had been mostly eaten away, leaving it with hollow, stained black sockets for eyes and teeth visible through its decaying flesh. It copied that sight to become an odious beast, a mangled abomination of nature.

Across its body, the spirit formed moss – the green and yellow clumps that oozed with musty dew – and felt lichen weave through its fur. The stench it emanated, of sweet rotting meat and the infected odour of pus and contagion, made even the spirit feel queasy. It did not want to know how terrible the smell – mingling with damp and mould and its sour, putrefied breath – would smell to their delicate human noses.

They looked on with their mouths agape in silent screams, teetering slightly as their consciousnesses began to wane with fear, until the spirit let out a roar. Spittle flew from its mouth with an almost visible odour, sounding like the deep, coarse roars of the bears curdling with the guttural, throaty bellows of male deer to create an ungodly, unnatural sound.

It formed one human word through its clamouring howl:

**_“RUN.”_ **

It spurred the humans to action. Only then did they scream, panicked, begging for mercy as their feet moved. They scrambled over each other in their haste to leave the room, forgetting their exploration as their terror peaked. They fled, shouting, careening down the hallways and slipping down the stairs, the spirit chasing them on its four heavy legs the whole way. It felt glee, giving more dissonant roars that made the intruders cry out more, until eventually they crashed to the ground floor. Wheeling through the room, they practically fell over each other in their rush to squirm back through the boarded window from which they’d entered.

Almost as soon as they had arrived, filling the spirit’s home with giggles and screams, they were gone. They did not look back as they pedalled through the forest once more, disappearing into the undergrowth, behind the trees, never to come back.

The spirit felt relief. It shrunk, disappeared, beastly form fading into the air as the sunbeams slipped through it once more, consuming its shadow until nothing remained.

The spirit was the guardian of this forest, and of this dishevelled home that lay within it, and it had protected its territory. Its work was done.


End file.
